2004

Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox lives up to the promotion it’s been getting. While mozilla’s marketing has been targeting Internet Explorer users, its preview release web browser compares favorably to Apple’s own Safari on Mac OS X, beating it in speed of loading pages. As for state-of-the-art features: Firefox blocks pop-ups, has tabs and usable bookmark management. One area in which it bests the Cupertino wizards’ app, oddly, is in the clean operation of its bookmark toolbar, which when it has menus works like a standard menu bar, showing each menu in turn as the mouse is moved after clicking on one menu. The only bad news is that animated graphics, found in so many embedded ads, suck up CPU cycles even when they’re not displayed, for example on an unselected tab page. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

It’s great to see the revival of an independent web browser that is good enough to win over users of the default browsers and thereby get the attention of website designers. The result will be improved compliance with standards, restoring and preserving the web’s platform neutrality.

The Pan-Mass Challenge auction is open now until the end of September. Nothing quite as cool as a Lance Armstrong autographed yellow jersey or a bike trip to the Tour de France, but still a chance to get a deal and contribute to the Jimmy Fund at the same time.

Here’s a 100 km New Hampshire seacoast loop between Wallis Sands State Beach and Pawtuckaway State Park including flat, rolling, and a little hilly terrain good for biking.
The following is just an outline, not a cue sheet, starting at the intersection of NH 1A and Marsh Rd. in Rye.

The Internet Go Server mainly provides a service for people to play games of Go remotely, but not insignificantly has some beautifully illustrated pages that introduce the service as well as the game itself. Nevertheless, the website is somewhat disorganized — perhaps due to different administrators for its various languages — and has some broken links that result in presumed error pages in Japanese. Nothing is perfect.

Users of Mac OS X are well advised to use Goban, which is a graphical IGS client as well as an interface to playing against a built-in version of GNU Go. Of course, there are other clients, including the platform independent gGo written in Java™.